Archive for November, 2015

The other day a user at my client site called me up as they were unable to rename a folder within their environment. We won’t get into folders and SharePoint now, that’s a post for another day. Whenever they tried to delete a folder they received the following message: Error: Invalid file name. The file name you specified could not be used. It may be the name of an existing file or directory, or you may not have permission to access the file. The error was received in both the GUI and Windows Explorer.

I had never encountered this error message before so to Google I went. There’s a lot out there and it mostly is around custom development. So we tried some of the usual troubleshooting:

Can she rename the folder?

Yes

Can she add files to the folder?

Yes

Can she delete files?

Yes

However, she couldn’t delete one particular file in the folder. And neither could I with my Site Collection Admin access. She couldn’t rename or delete the file. So none of the suggestions worked that I came across on the internet, but I do have a solution, so if none of the suggestions are working that you have reviewed give this one a try:

Check to see if the user has the file inside the folder open.

If the file is open then you won’t be able to rename or delete the file, nor will you be able to rename the folder. It certainly would be nice if the error received actually had something to do with the problem occurring (I realize it kind of does, but let’s be honest.. not really)

So the other day I was preparing a demo for a BCS presentation I will be doing next month. Everything was working fine right up until I wanted to demonstrate using an external data column within a Word document.

For some reason I was unable to set the value of the field from within Word. When I opened a Word document in the library it would pull the field in as set at the library level. When I added a Quick Part pointing to the field and attempted to make a selection I receive the error: “In order to pick external items you must have Microsoft Connectivity Services client components installed. For more information visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=257792”.

Turns out, I simply don’t know how to read instructions :-/ . For BCS client integration, Microsoft states you need to install SQL Server Compact 4.0, .NET Framework 4, and WCF Data Services 5.0 for OData V3 on the PC running the app. When I was preparing my environment I made the silly mistake of thinking since I wasn’t developing apps for the demo I didn’t need to install SQL Server Compact.

Once I corrected the mistake and installed SQL Server Compact the integration worked fine. Note: .NET 4.5 is fine.